The Incomprehensible Sportswriting of Jimmy Bannon

One evening years ago I was slouched over the bar of Jakey and Wanda's on 45th
when Miss Perkins came in alone. She wore a real mink coat over her rehearsal
slacks and explained she had dropped by for a fast one during a break in the
routine. That was fine with me. It flattered a young cub reporter not yet twenty
years old and a face covered in pimples that she recognized him and he bought
her a drink. When it came time for the second round, Miss Perkins, who was then
a star, whispered to me to take my money off the bar. It was no come on.

Go ahead. Walk the streets of the Village if you knew them as a
child, and you are now a stranger there. The horse players grumble
a lot and now the trotters make them crazy, just plain crazy. The
old ones are decent hardworking people. They'll tell you about Jimmy
Biggles, who ran the joint on Gilbert Street when he was a pug.
We yearned to be baseball players or pugs when I was a kid.

The big storms turned me back into the lonely winters of my boyhood.
It was the plague of the tenements. We'd eat dinner in overcoats
and steal wooden breadbaskets and write with a piece of chalk with
a string on it. I can remember liniment and kerosene and old socks
and I still have a bump on my nose.

I never met John Fitzgerald Kennedy and I was never in Sandusky
Ohio. I'll tell you something else, too, about the chiseled granite
of statesmen's speeches: They don't move me. Never did. But I remember
him kidding with Casey Stengel and the pair of them laughed it up.
Now I sit in my room and the years stir and rustle like leaves and
whispering crowds at the flyweight championship, and Red LaRocca.
Pitcher. Semipro club from the neighborhood. Thanksgiving was always
a good night for the lush rollers.

It ended in 1931. "He's half a ballplayer," Mack said. "I don't
want half a ballplayer." I imagine I know as much about him as most
people and more than many. Pepper Martin, Frankie Frisch, Jim Botomley,
Chick Hafey, Jimmy Wilson. You're Ted Williams who never wanted
partners. You're Roger Maris who isn't Babe Ruth. You're Don Drysdale
and it should have been a big year. You're Joe Namath who has it
all. Things would happen just because Mays, the centerfielder, was
in there. They just did.

Kearney was a fight manager who wouldn't be in a fight to save
his mother. He has never participated in a crime of violence but
he lives by the code. The code of the underworld. It's too bad Doc
didn't make it; the joints never fold in Vegas. The lonesome man
is often inarticulate, a bogus mystery with Graziano in Pompton
Lakes. They had both beaten him but all they wanted to talk about
was how they thought he was a real game guy. His son, "Bumby," a
second lieutenant with the OSS, was captured as he guided a German
spy back to the enemy lines. Snipers and grenades and strangling
on phlegm and it was the brandy that got him through. They talk
about what Bill Veeck can do but Werblin used every angle to turn
Smolinski into a Boog Powell parody of Billie Holiday with a Cantonese
accent and a Chaplin moustache on tiptoes.

There are those who say the war doesn't belong in the sports pages
and I'm not here to argue with them but it's Korea again and this
time the buzzer of my apartment went dat, datter, de dat, dat dat.
I opened the door stinking of towels and dressed only in a fine
Cuban. He was tall and fleshy and on the verge of middle age, thick
and mussed, like a photograph out of focus. According to the bitter
theme of countless first novels the bookmaker is forced to be stingy
and cruel. All I found were horseplayers trying to cash a bet. "Take
a chick out tomorrow," said Two Head Charlie. Overseas, every chick
is Raquel Welch. Babe chuckled, but his laugh became a cough.

I admit all managers ain't bible salesmen, and maybe it can be
patched up. I hope so, anyway. Because nobody asked me.